Friday, May 25, 2007

Pilfering Petrol

We're all hit by sticker shock when we go to the gas station to fuel up these days, and many of us are thinking twice about dashing to the store or are deciding to ride a bike or walk if we can (not that there's anything wrong with that...). And along with the price of a gallon of gas, it looks like big oil's profits are skyrocketing again. But aside from some grumbling and low-level complaining, from all appearances it doesn't seem to have hit a public nerve.

Now it looks like some folks have taken matters into their own hands. Though instead of protests and rallies, they've decided the best route is to steal from their fellow citizens. My husband hopped in his twenty-year-old truck to head to work this morning and saw through his rear window that his gas cap was sitting on the wheel well in the pickup bed. A quick check of the gas gauge revealed that it was down to a quarter tank, well below what it should have been since its last fill-up.

So now we're looking into getting locking gas caps, something we haven't had to do since the seventies and the last gas crisis. Is anyone paying attention?

6 comments:

Well, hopefully they've got the kids who did that in custody. It's interesting that the media was trying to make it into a political story. Which raises the question of whether, like the eco-torchings case, they'd be tried as terrorists.

In any case, I'm sure this has more to do with the high price of gas at the pump and will undoubtedly last as long as we're all held hostage by the oil and gas companies.

No pilfering comment here, but I use portlandgasprices.com before buying gas anymore. I now go about 2 miles way east of my normal path to the 'cheapest' Chevron in my area. It's a website definately worth checking out!

Someone designed a widget to use with the Mac OSX Dashboard that interfaces with gaspricewatch.com and Google Maps. We've got it on a couple of our computers and use it occasionally, but sometimes it's cheaper to go to a closer station than drive out just to get cheap gas. Good times...